Barefoot Gen Volume Eight ―"Merchants of Death" ― It's 1950 and Gen is now in middle school, where he meets both a progressive-minded schoolteacher at odds with his conservative superiors, and a brilliant but cynical classmate who challenges the teacher's — and Gen's — values at every turn. Gen also finds himself confronting the corrosive effects on postwar Hiroshima society of drugs and the arms industry. With the Korean War offering new business opportunities, a new generation of death merchants holds sway in Japan. Gen, his teacher mentor, and other peace-minded citizens are forced to struggle against red-baiting school officials, violent nationalists, and government censorship.